


this is how the world works

by alleyesonthehindenburg



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Carlye-centric, Child Neglect, Multi, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:35:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24644932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alleyesonthehindenburg/pseuds/alleyesonthehindenburg
Summary: this is how the world works: you gotta leave before you get left.
Relationships: Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce/Carlye Walton
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	this is how the world works

**Author's Note:**

> the title/summary are shamelessly taken from a Taylor Swift song ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

“I should have changed,” her dad says, barely lifting his foot as she tugs his boot off. His breath reeks of liquor, but Carlye’s fourteen, and isn’t sure what kind yet. She’s learning, though. “Shoulda changed for her.”

She doesn’t pay any attention as she starts on untying his other shoe. It’s the same thing he’s told her ever since her mother walked out of their lives, and there’s nothing new to learn here. She thinks about that a lot. Wonders if maybe she ought to pick up and go, make a home for herself somewhere else. Dana from school swears up and down that her older brother ran away and joined the circus, but she also swears that she saw a man with big bug wings kidnap her cat, so what does she know, anyway.

Still, Carlye can’t help but imagine it. She could take a bus to Columbus, and earn money singing on the street. (No, she can’t really sing, but maybe she has a hidden talent she just hasn’t tapped into yet.) She’d make enough to go to college for literature, and then she’d fall in love with a handsome law school student and be married and live happily ever after.

In the meantime, though, she’s throwing a blanket over her father as he snores on the couch, and she can’t help but think he should change for her, too.

She doesn’t run away, in the end, and she doesn’t study literature or marry a law student, but she does go to Columbus. From the time she’s fifteen she works at the local diner, and makes paper runs on the weekends, and when she’s eighteen she’s accepted into Ohio State University on scholarship. Somewhere along the line, she falls into nursing. There’s a kind of irony in it, making a career of taking care of people who can’t take care of themselves; it’s only what she’s been doing for her father since she was a kid.

In her second year at Mt. Carmel College of Nursing, she meets John. He’s getting his master’s in education at Capital University, and he makes her feel special. He laughs at her quips, calls her pretty, says he admires how independent she is. She’s never felt so noticed. John pays attention to her, knows what she likes, knows how she likes to spend time together without smothering her. On their first Valentine’s Day, he cooks her dinner, with rice pudding – her favourite – for dessert, and asks her to move in. She says yes.

It’s all downhill from there.

He gets to be more distant, spends more time at school or work. He’s not cooking for her anymore, and he doesn’t seem very interested when Carlye talks about her classes. Their quality times come less and less often. The compliments become rote. She’s losing him, and she thinks she finally knows how her father felt, in those months before her mother left.

Well, Carlye isn’t her father. She can change. She does change.

It doesn’t help.

By the time she graduates from Mt. Carmel, a full nurse practitioner, she’s living on her own again, and is absolutely sick of Columbus.

Boston is a new beginning. It’s nothing like the Midwestern cities she’s used to, big and bustling with a perpetual sea breeze, and she relishes the difference. Tufts is a real hospital, and a good opportunity for her career. She doesn’t go in looking for a man, but… doesn’t every woman, really?

Hawkeye Pierce is kind and charismatic, making jokes even as the senior residents glare daggers, and she should know better than to date a doctor but she can’t help herself. She thinks it’ll be something short and casual, barely more than a fling, but he’s surprisingly sweet, and Carlye’s never been able to resist someone who makes her feel special and seen. He asks her to go steady in December, when they go to the Boston Commons together to watch the Christmas tree lighting.

She stares up at him for a long moment, thinking. After John, she promised herself she wouldn’t change for anyone. She and Hawkeye aren’t a perfect fit; she’s been keeping track of all the places that their edges don’t fit, looking out for what’s gonna come back and bite them in the ass. They can’t work like this, she’s sure of it.

But maybe it’s someone else’s turn to change.

“Yeah,” she says, “let’s.”

“Don’t be such a peacock,” she snaps at him, one evening when he’s preening in the mirror, and it becomes one more thing to add to the list. It’s getting exhausting, trying to keep track of everything. Hawkeye sniffs his food like a child. He’s egotistical (just like every other surgeon she’s met) and competitive, and sulks for days if one of his jokes falls flat. He doesn’t spend enough time with her, and when he does, he’s clingy and pushy and makes her feel smothered.

She wonders if it’s unfair, sometimes. She fell in love with him for the fun of it; can she really ask him to change? But it’s for his sake as much as hers. You can’t make your way through this world behaving like a child. Hell, she  _ was _ a child when she learned that lesson. She’s doing him a favour when she knocks his ego down a peg, when she tells him not to be so clingy. No woman wants that, she points out. (Not that it matters. He has her. It’s just the principle of the thing, really.)

Their first big fight comes when he’s sick. It’s just a cold, but she comes home to find him curled up on the bed, sneezing and coughing on the covers like he’s never so much as heard of common courtesy. She had half a mind to make him soup or something nice, but that thought goes right out the window. It’s not the greatest start, maybe, whapping him upside the head with a newspaper and demanding to know what he’s doing, but the sore throat isn’t stopping him from yelling right back. At the end of the night he’s huddled onto their too-small couch, sleeping away while she has to wash the contaminated bedsheets.

It’s a few days later that he comes home with flowers, says they’re just because. The next time he’s sick, he relocates to the sofa without any fuss. It’s an improvement.

Hawkeye changes. He grows, comes closer to being the man Carlye dreams of, but not close enough. She’s beginning to think it’s beyond him to put her first. After all this time, he’ll still show up an hour late to their anniversary dinner because he was holding the hand of some patient who wasn’t in any danger. Arguing with him about it is like beating a brick wall. She’s sick of scraping her fists bloody.

He’s passed out on the sofa one morning when she wakes, still in his clothes with one shoe on. Maybe he was too tired after his night shift to make it to bed, or maybe he didn’t want to disturb her. She spends a long moment standing there, staring, the eggs and toast she had in mind forgotten. Knowing him, it could easily be the latter. He’s been so good, lately, about not disturbing her. He’s been so good to her.

When she was a girl, she would pack all her things into her suitcase, quick as she could, counting out her savings for that ticket to Columbus. And then, every time, her father came home drunk, and she helped put him to bed, unpacked her trunk and tucked her money away. Rinse, repeat. She’s a quick hand at this, and she’s glad for once that she and Hawkeye couldn’t afford the more spacious two-storey apartment. There’s no stairs for her trunk to bang against as she drags it outside.

The chill November air is a shock, and she stands still for a moment, breathing it in. “Oh, god, what am I doing,” she whispers.

_ I should have changed. Shoulda changed for her. _

Maybe it goes both ways. Maybe she’ll get it right next time.

She leaves Hawkeye Pierce with just a blanket draped over him for a goodbye, and her key hidden beneath the doormat.


End file.
